3.
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your status
with facebook:
it's complicated
Facebook was a good place to start your brand’s foray into
social media. The likes rolled in, and showed you what you
already knew—there are millions of people out there who are
passionate about your brand. You answered a few questions
and resolved a few issues for your customers, and maybe
even got some new customers off a fans-only coupon. But
despite all the effort you’ve put into your Facebook presence,
you’re not seeing the kind of effortless engagement and sales
growth you thought would follow once you got enough likes.
Now what?
facebook fan
#7,864
facebook fan
#23,653
n
facebook fa
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it's easy to be
liked, but it's hard
to be loved
Likes may be the currency of interaction on Facebook, but
In this discussion, we’ll explore why Facebook and other
they don’t mean much when it comes to purchases and brand
social networks, while important channels for creating
loyalty. This isn’t surprising when you consider that 98% of
awareness and driving traffic, can’t provide the level of
Facebook users who like a brand page never return to that
engagement you want with your customers—especially when
page again , and 61% of Facebook users only like a page in
it comes to converting that engagement into purchases.
order to get access to a special offer or coupon.2 No matter
But we’re not here just to offer doom and gloom. Instead,
how good your Facebook content might be, it’s likely to get
we’ll propose a solution to this problem—a way to bring
lost in the sea of posts, photos and videos from thousands of
engagement back to your home turf, and build customer
other sources—including your competitors.
relationships that translate directly into sales.
1
You may have even experimented with setting up a shop on
Facebook. Like many brands, you probably discovered that,
as Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru notes, selling on
Facebook is like “trying to sell stuff to people while they’re
hanging out with their friends at the bar.” Even some of
the world’s most recognizable brands like Gap, Gamestop,
J.C. Penney, and Nordstrom have shuttered their fledgling
Facebook shops. The likes simply didn’t translate into
in-Facebook sales.3
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5.
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why facebook
alone is not
enough
We’d never say that Facebook isn’t useful. Facebook is an
Though its users might see it as a terrific distraction from
increasingly valuable addition to advertisers’ digital media
work, Facebook itself is always on the job. Like any other
plans. Its strengths in reach and targeting are useful for
company, they’re in the business of making money, especially
creating awareness and driving traffic. For many advertisers,
now that they’ve gone public. That’s why, even when a
Facebook is becoming a viable alternative to traditional
Facebook user has liked your page, there’s an 84% chance that
awareness-building media like television and radio. That’s why
your communication won’t appear to them at all, because it
marketers who buy ads on Facebook are increasingly more
will be filtered out of their newsfeed by Facebook’s EdgeRank
focused on building brand awareness than on accumulating
algorithm.5 The only way to reliably reach your Facebook fans
fans or engaging with their existing fans.
is to pay Facebook to run an ad campaign. Like a matchmaker,
4
But at the end of the day, Facebook is in the business of
building Facebook. Even on your brand’s page, Facebook’s
branding, style, and colors are the centerpiece, not yours.
Facebook sets the framework for the way your page is laid out,
and the things a customer can do there. There’s no getting
Facebook has facilitated your initial connection with the
consumer, but they want you to pay for the privilege of sending
love notes. Given these facts, it’s no surprise that the vast
majority of users never return to your page once they become
fans. They’re just not seeing your messages.
around the fact that the user experience on your Facebook
page is less about your brand, and more about Facebook.
what leading analysts say about where brands should send their traffic
“Your audience uses social media
— that doesn’t mean you should
use Facebook at the heart of your
branding ecosystem. Your big idea
should live on a site you own.”
Nate Elliot, Forrester Research
“It’s...dumb to keep driving traffic into
Facebook. You should drive traffic
to your sites and your communities
by pulling from Facebook into what
you’re doing.”
Ray Wang, Constellation Research
“While you might want to leave your
Twitter followers and Facebook
fans on Facebook, the smart
move is to divert them to your own
communities whenever possible.”
“Stop sending all your traffic to
Mark Zuckerberg!”
Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group
Dion Hinchcliffe, Dachis Group
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Even if you’re content with the way your Facebook page
looks and functions, there’s still an enormous competition
for your customers’ attention when they’re there. Not only
are you fighting for attention with other brands, you’re also
fighting to be heard above a din of non-shopping-related
things that people deeply care about: photos of their loved
ones, important news stories, even memorial pages for the
deceased. You’re literally competing with jobs and kids and
You need your own social place.
A deeply engaging place where
your customers can connect
with each other about their
pets and dinner and football.
shared passions, and where
If Facebook remains the main social place where you interact
your brand is always central to
with your fans, you’ll continue to have to fight to make your
voice heard, and Facebook will continue to broker your
relationship with your own customers.
the conversation.
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a clean,
well-lit place
on the internet
As we said, we don’t want to be too hard on Facebook. They’ve
People want to belong: it’s a basic human need. We all want
successfully created a place where people want to spend
to share our passions and experiences with other like-minded
time. Facebook and Twitter have become the new broadcast
people. If you can make your website a thriving community,
media, and like the television studios were in their heyday,
you’ll transform it from a place your customers visit to a
they are immensely powerful. When you’re frustrated with the
place where they dwell. You’ll create a party where you’re the
business results you’re getting on Facebook or Twitter, your
host, and the guests have engaging conversations that center
first impulse might be to work with or change the system on
around your brand. By doing so, you’ll also drive purchases,
those sites, but their rules are already established. You need a
build brand loyalty, and foster brand advocacy. While top
place where you can decorate in your own way, arrange things
brands like Home Depot, Sephora, and Best Buy have already
how you like, and create an immersive environment with a
taken this path (and reaped enormous sales benefits), it’s still
customer experience that is all your own.
a relatively new phenomenon that many top retailers haven’t
On your website, you have an opportunity to connect with
your customers in a way you can’t anywhere else. That’s
yet adopted. By creating this kind of community now, you have
a unique chance to stand out from your competitors.
why your website is the perfect centerpiece for executing a
The best social strategy is manifested as a hub-and-
comprehensive social marketing strategy. But when we say
spoke system. Your website is the social hub, and it’s a
“your website”, we really mean “your website as it should be,”
clearinghouse of conversation on subjects that relate closely
not “your website as it is now.” If you’re following the same
to the products you sell. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest
pattern as some other major brands, your website still lacks
and other social networks serve as the spokes, picking up
the social experience that consumers have come to expect
people from their far-flung digital points of origin and bringing
in their favorite digital places. And no, the share buttons you
them to the bustling metropolis that is your website, where
placed on your pages don’t count as a social experience!
they can engage more fully with each other—and with you.
We’re talking about an authentic community.
how home depot centralizes and controls the social customer experience
“The How-To Community on homedepot.com deeply engages our customers with useful DIY social content. In the community,
our customers connect with each other and our store associates over a shared passion for home improvement. The creation
of a central social hub on our own website has unified the components of our social commerce strategy, tying together our
presences on social channels like Twitter and Facebook. This 'all roads lead to homedepot.com' strategy ensures that the
Home Depot brand is always top-of-mind among customers who are passionately discussing their home improvement projects.”
Eric Breier, Sr. Director Online Customer Experience, The Home Depot
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Best Buy
superfan
Sephora
superfan
When they arrive, it’s important to have some top-notch
greeters who can guide them in doing what they want to
do, whether it’s researching a purchase, getting a question
Home De
po
superfant
answered, or just talking with others about a shared passion.
Luckily, those people already exist for you. We call them
superfans. They’re ordinary folks, but their passion for your
products gives them extraordinary power. If you provide them
with encouragement and the right social tools, they will spend
hours of unpaid time talking about their great experiences
with the products you sell, or your fantastic customer service
that more than redeemed the time something went wrong.
When new consumers show up with questions (“What’s
the best style of shoe for jogging?” “Which lipstick lasts the
longest?”), superfans are happy to share their experiences
and guide the questioner to the product that’s right for
them. And once they identify the right product, but express
trepidation about buying (“Is the return policy good?” “Is the
shipping fast?”), superfans are there to reassure them.
You’ve always known that customers are far more likely to
trust their friends’ recommendations than they are to trust
yours, but research has shown that they’re also more likely
to trust the opinions of unaffiliated strangers.6 (If you’ve
ever visited a restaurant on the strength of a top-notch Yelp
rating or perused Rotten Tomatoes before plunking down
your $10 at the multiplex, you’ve put your trust in strangers,
too.) On the Internet, strangers with common interests are
just friends you haven’t met yet, and their opinions can mean
the difference between “Add to cart” or closing the browser.
If strangers can have this much of an impact on your sales,
then it’s worth the time to create a place where the ones who
love your brand want to hang out.
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9.
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control the
experience and
drive sales
When you’re in control of your social customer experience,
some pretty amazing things can happen. Part of the beauty
of centralizing your social strategy on your website is
discovering needs that you never recognized—and having
the ability to immediately fulfill them, without relying on
Facebook or Twitter to introduce new options on their own
Even if the peer reviews for a given product are less than
schedules. That said, there are some tried-and-true methods
stellar, there can still be positive results. Negative user-
that top retailers have used again and again to drive customer
generated content is still a powerful conversion tool: Reevoo
interaction. Here are a few of our favorites:
found that shoppers who go out of their way to read bad
Peer reviews. Imagine you’re trying to buy a new pair of jeans,
and you’re confronted with two identically-designed product
pages for a specific SKU, with identical photos of a model and
identical copy. One of them is full of glowing reviews from
strangers, talking about how comfortable the jeans are.
The other has nothing—you’ll just have to take the company’s
word for it. Which page is more likely to have you clicking
the “Buy” button?
reviews convert 67% more than the average customer. Though
this may seem counterintuitive, it actually makes a lot of
sense. The mere presence of reviews, whether good or bad,
engages the customer and keeps them on the page, ultimately
increasing their likelihood to convert to purchase. And when
a consumer sees negative peer reviews on your site, the
message they receive is that you’re honest, and that you don’t
censor less-than-ideal feedback just to make a buck.
24 Hour Fitness customers are passionate about staying
24 Hour Fitness features ratings and reviews for each
of its gym locations and classes, increasing buyers’
confidence by assisting them in their research.
healthy and strong, and that engagement drives the highquality reviews they submit to 24HourFitness.com. Most 24
Hour Fitness locations and classes have scores of reviews,
with candid opinions of fitness fanatics. If a user sees 18
reviews averaging a four-star rating for a gym location, they’re
able to feel far more confident when they click the Purchase
Membership button. And if they have a question about that
specific gym location, they can post it on the individual
location’s Q&A section (more on that below).
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Q&As. Consumers are increasingly turning to the Web for
product research. You can see it in their Google searches,
where the word “best” pops up a lot, from “best power drill” to
“best paring knife.” Allowing customers to state their needs,
and get feedback from their peers on what constitutes “best”
for them, is an important part of converting visits to sales.
Suppose a customer comes to your site to look for a
Blu-Ray player. They have specific features in mind, so they
visit many product pages. Eventually, they get frustrated at
the sheer number of options, close the browser, and put
off the purchase for later. Imagine a site where the same
Product research questions from newcomers
to Best Buy’s Unboxed community are quickly
answered by helpful superfans.
customer can quickly post, “I’m looking for a Blu-Ray player
that up-converts DVDs, has Netflix and Hulu Plus included,
and has a sleek profile to fit under my TV,” and get two or
three passionate, confident recommendations back from
other people who’ve already been through the Blu-Ray player
shopping process. The consumer is far more likely to take
a look at two or three product pages, make a decision,
off hours, helping customers with the knowledge they’ve
picked up working in the store. It also allows consumers to
troubleshoot technical issues and complete installations,
saving them a return trip to the store and increasing their
and buy.
satisfaction with their purchases.
These Q&As have a long shelf life. Other people looking for
Innovation and ideas. Part of the care and feeding of
the same type of Blu-Ray player can peruse them a month
or a year later, using the same information to research and
execute a purchase. And the the Q&As have fantastic SEO
value. A person who might not know your site, but is looking
for a “best” product, might end up at that very same Q&A
superfans is making them feel as important to you
as they are, especially because they’re advocating for
you without a paycheck. Luckily, there’s a way you
can do this without spending much (or any) money:
enable them to have a say about a brand that’s important to
after a Google search—and proceed to purchase it from you.
them. When you’re considering a new site design, expanding
Best Buy has reaped many of these benefits with their
products to carry, you might spend thousands of dollars
Unboxed community, which not only has consumers posting
on market research with people who have little or no love
about their technology interests and getting responses, but
for your brand. Superfans, on the other hand, want you to
many other silent readers following the threads. Even some
succeed, because they’re the only people who care as much
Best Buy retail employees have gotten in on the act in their
about your brand as you do.
into a new product category, or deciding which of two similar
8

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As customers vote on their
peers’ ideas in the Verizon
Idea Exchange, the ideas are
automatically prioritized for
consideration by the Verizon
product team.
Verizon has the crowdsourced innovation process down to
a science. Verizon Ideas is a popular way for customers
to shape Verizon’s products and strategy with feedback and
ideas. The idea prioritization system is similar to popular
social sites like Digg—a community member submits an idea,
and other members can vote that idea up to the top of the list,
if they think it deserves to be there. In a single year, Verizon
received 1,700 idea submissions, over 280 of which were
implemented. Verizon clearly takes customer ideas seriously:
85% of the features in the company’s IMG 1.9 software were
customer-suggested.
Making superfans feel valued can have benefits that go far
beyond just keeping them coming back to your site. When
a superfan feels like they’ve had an impact on the design
how verizon uses customer feedback
to make products that sell
“The Verizon Community has now become fully ingrained in
our product management processes. It has helped Verizon
get closer to the customer, gain insights to help us take
action, look for issues needing attention (early detection),
and improve customer retention.”
Becky Carroll, Community Manager, Verizon
or implementation of a product, it’s like having a new
baby: they’re proud. They might head over to Facebook
and Twitter and promote it to their family and friends,
explaining that they backed the winning horse. It’s a virtuous
cycle, and one that can drive more sales than you ever
thought possible.
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Gamification. Another way to keep superfans coming back is
why beauty talk members outspend regular
sephora customers by 150%
“We built our Beauty Talk community on our website and, as we
opened our doors, it was flooded with clients dying to talk about
beauty with each other. It was exactly what we wanted. What we
found was that clients were not only trying to talk with us, they were
trying to talk with each other. And they were actually engaging in
ways we had no idea they would.”
Bridget Dolan, VP of Interactive Media, Sephora
to give them a way to show their status to other users, and
reward them for their contributions. This method is known
as gamification, because it allows users to rack up points for
contributing, just like they would if they were playing a video
game. When a user provides something that contributes to
the whole community, whether it’s writing a post, answering
a question, or correctly tagging a Q&A so that other users
can quickly search for it, they’re creating value. By showing
them exactly how much value they’re creating—and offering
a reward for a certain level of contribution, like a badge or
special permissions—you motivate them to return to your site
again and again, instead of answering a question or two and
ending the relationship there.
Sephora’s BeautyTalk community is a great example of
how gamification can promote engagement. When a user
registers, they’re initially classified as a “Newcomer,” but the
more they post and answer other users’ questions, the higher
up the ranks they go. Users who have answered 20 questions
are labeled “Beauty Maven,” those who’ve posted 50 or more
times are labeled “Beauty Pro,” and the biggest contributors
are marked as “Beauty Master” or even “Hall of Famer.” Each
title comes with its own special graphic (like a lipstick kiss or
a shopping bag) next to the user’s name, indicating to newer
users who the experts are.
Sephora uses gamification
elements such as badges,
titles and special website
privileges to confer status to
its highly valued superfans.
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how Lithium
can help
If you’ve ever bought anything online, these behaviors
probably make sense to you, because you’ve engaged in
them yourself. But your budget has limits and your web
development team is busy. Facebook is free and easy to use,
which is why it was a no-brainer for you to set up a page
there—but creating an amazing customer engagement hub
on your website? That takes time and money.
We created Lithium for people like you. Our products provide
an out-of-the-box solution that encompasses all of the arenas
we discussed, from peer reviews to Q&As to gamification.
But every brand is different, and our solutions aren’t cookiecutter. We’ll work with you and your technical team to identify
a look, style, and gamification system that work within the
existing design of your website, and integrate social and
community features seamlessly into every single page.
Unlike Facebook, we’re not interested in stealing the show
from the brands we work with—even though our technology
is plugging away behind the scenes at many of the Web’s best
retailers and consumer brands.
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